Windows 98SE CAB-Files

Microsoft seems to assume, that Windows 98SE will be only installed on systems with
plenty of disk-capacity, because without asking the user during installation, if copies all
setup-files from the CD-ROM to the harddisk.

Check your system by selecting from the "Start"-menu: "Find" / "Files or Folders" and
search for *.cab:

When you have a closer look at the folder: Windows\options\cabs :

121 Mbytes of Setup-files !
(some of you should remember the original Windows 95 released in Aug.95 ? If you got it on floppies:
15 (? ) floppies; on CD-ROM, it had 17 CAB-files, while Windows98-SE comes on 74 CAB-files, quite a growth ! )

If you are short in disk-capacity on your C-drive, you can move these 121 Mbytes to a different
disk-drive (or you can decide to install any required files from CD-ROM (although it is much
more convenient to have the setup-files directly accessible on harddisk ).

If you move these setup-files, you need to update the Registry under the key:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Setup :

It contains under the key : "SourcePath" the location of the setup-files, change it to point to the
new disk-location or to "Win98"-directory on the Windows98-SE-CD-ROM.

Have a closer look at the display-icon of the CAB-files ?

The CAB-viewer is integrated into the
Windows Explorer
(on Win95, a CAB-viewer could be
downloaded from the Microsoft website
as part of the PowerToys).

However: although the files inside
a CAB-file are displayed like a
regular folder and although you can
use Copy/Paste and/or Drag-and-Drop
to copy files from a CAB-file to
another location (you can NOT
copy a file INTO a CAB-file),
files inside a CAB-file can NOT be
used directly:
example, when double-clicking on an
AVI-file (to start the Media-Player )
inside a CAB-file, you are first prompted
for a location to copy the file before the
file will be display from its new location.